IMPCT – Building Education Businesses

For us education isn’t a gimmick. It isn’t a technology. It isn’t a product. Education is kids in a safe place, being guided through the learning process by qualified teachers. Education is a meal when you get to school to prime the brain for learning. Education is playing and socializing with other kids. A solution must be HOLISTIC.

The only way to bridge the gap between the “developed” world and urban slums is with real honest education. This is IMPCT’s mission. We want to build sustainable schools that are community run but globally owned. The heart of our solution is a revolutionary platform that enables direct equity investments into urban slum schools. How does it work?

We find capable people to own and operate sustainable education businesses in urban slums and our unique platform lets anybody, anywhere (YOU!) invest in their success.

We build their schools with help from our great NGO partners to keep quality high and costs low.

We work with all our schools on an ongoing basis to ensure that none are left behind.

Our investors receive a portion of the school’s profits to reinvest in more schools. The community keeps the rest to reinvest in themselves.

Education for the world’s poorest is everybody’s business; IMPCT lets you invest in it.

Our Plan Starts With You

The money raised through this campaign will allow us to do two equally important things.

The first $20,000 will build our prototype school in El Salvador. India has proven that private education is an incredibly successful model is urban slums, where over 70% of all students receive affordable education outside the government system. We will show that we can adapt this model for early learning schools in Latin America.

The next $5,000 will go towards starting development on our unique microequity platform. Today we’re starting with a single school, but this platform will allow us to build thousands more over the next five years with investments from people like you.

Our Inspiration – Meet Rosita

We met Rosita, a single mother, during a recent trip to the slums of San Salvador. To make ends meet she runs an informal daycare, taking care of a few neighborhood children in addition to her own. She makes a couple of dollars a day per child; just enough to provide the basics for her family . She has little to no training and runs her daycare out of her humble home.

We asked Rosita: “Why not expand and take care of more kids?”

She answered: “I have no money, no space, how could this be possible?”

Financing in Urban Slums

For Rosita, and millions like her in the slums, there are simply no viable options for scaling up and improving their existing small businesses. Many are struggling to feed, house, and educate their own families let alone be able to set aside money to reinvest in themselves. Charity might provide temporary relief or an occasional skills training programs, but it certainly won’t build Rosita a school of her own. Even if Rosita is one of the lucky few with access to micro loans, there’s almost no way her school would be economically viable with their typically massive interest rates. With only these options, talented and entrepreneurial individuals like Rosita have no ability to finance businesses providing potentially vast social and economic benefits for their communities.

Equity: The Missing Link

Access to low cost equity capital is the foundation of modern developed economies. Imagine where Apple, Facebook, Twitter, or Uber would be if their only option was debt financing at 50% interest! At these rates even the best of projects are complete non-starters. Equity capital is, in a very real sense, what put the “developed” in “developed world”. For the working poor in urban slums, however, there is no such option. Despite this enormous financing handicap, people like Rosita have already been able to do so much with so little. We only dare to imagine what they could do given the same privileges we enjoy in the “developed” world.

The IMPCT Solution – A Unique Micro-Equity Platform

Extending access to low cost equity is the heart of the IMPCT solution. This microequity concept is what will allow us to scale the school we build from this campaign into thousands more across the world. Our platform will allow anybody, anywhere in the world to make real investments in promising urban slum education projects. By financing these schools with your capital we do two important things. First, we decrease the cost to open and run a school; this allows thousands of sustainable schools to built and run on affordable tuition alone. Second, we raise massive awareness about urban slum problems by directly aligning the interests of investors every and the people in these communities.

Our Early Childhood Education Focus

The research is clear: access to affordable early childhood education is one of the single biggest drivers of economic and social success in urban slum communities. In the long term, every dollar invested into ECE provides a staggering 7-13$ in return. Although we believe in our platform’s ability to develop any social business, our initial focus will be building ECE schools. Why? Two reasons. First, everything starts with childhood education. It’s the foundation upon which a strong community is built. Second, investing responsibly means more than simply making sure capital gets into the right hands. It means giving that capital the highest chance to build a successful business. Our current capabilities and partner network are tailored to building successful education projects. Our investors can rest easy knowing that their capital will realize its full potential social and financial ROI.

What You Get

We thought long and hard about the kind of perks we could offer that would mirror our mission. Every dollar you donate through this campaign will go directly towards building schools in underserved communities. To ensure that the benefits don’t stop there, EVERYBODY who donates more than $10 will receive a $5 credit on our platform. Once it’s up and running you can use this money to invest in future deserving projects of your choosing. Check out our perks for more information.

The Impact

With your help we can completely revolutionize the way social businesses are built in urban slums. Once our platform is up and running, every $10,000 invested will have the following amazing benefits:

Up-develop an existing residence into a safe and nurturing ECE school for 20-25 children aged 0-6. Every school can provide quality education and nutrition to hundreds of students a year.

Create 2-3 skilled teaching jobs

Help a deserving person own their own economic and social value creating business.

Risks & Challenges

We known that we can make a real difference. We’re working with everybody from local NGOs, to education professionals, to venture capitalists to ensure that our plan is implementable and our targets reasonable. However there are always unseen events that could have negative effects.

School costs and revenue can only be estimated so well in advance. Major deviations from these estimates would require our funding requirements or timelines to be modified.

There could be a challenge with initially populating our platform with quality projects. Our initial capitalization will determine our initial geographical reach.

Thanks to Our Great Partners

We’d like to thank a few very special partners.

Taipei Angels, Taipei’s premiere VC group. Your support has helped us more than we can say. Thank you so much.

FUSAL and FEPADE, El Salvador’s largest education NGOs. Thanks for helping us reach out into the slums and show us that the people there are worth investing in.

TECHO, Latin America’s largest NGO builder. Thank you for helping us conceptualize our up-developed school. We look forward to building the first one with you this summer!

NCCU Taipei/Taiwanese Ministry of Education. Thank you both for your project and financial support and help developing our unique curriculum.